a central point for students enrolled in A&M624

There are a couple of things you need to think about when deciding what you are going to do for the design and implementation part of your assessment.

Do you want to work with others or on your own?

Do you want to take on all or part of one of the projects suggested, or

Do you want to write your own project brief?

You might want to start thinking about these questions and we can discuss the advantages and disadvantages and the options in class. It will not make any difference ultimately to the work that you do for the assessment but it may alter the process that you go through. While working with someone else can help you with the skills that you don’t have, scripting perhaps, but of course collaboration can be a double-edged sword and you may feel you have less control over your work!

This week for the technical session we will be having a quick look at one of the advanced modelling options for builds in Second Life; Sculpties. To read up on exactly what a sculptie is visit this FAQ page on the Second Life Wiki. That will give you an overview of what we are talking about in the inworld session. Sculpties allow more organic models to be built and also facilitate the reduction of prim numbers on a sim if used correctly. Below is an image of an in-world modelling tool developed specifically for creating sculpties but many standard 3D modelling applications such as Blender or Maya can also be used.

Sculptie Example - Click to Enlarge

Once we have looked over sculpties I will then be available to work with you on your individual projects for the rest of the session. Don’t forget to post your interaction ideas on the blog (Particles 101 is where we are gathering them together) so that all the class can share in the thought process and the working out of the interaction scripts.

So that all of you may work on the group parcel on your own projects unhindered by others’ work, and so that we may have space for our class sessions, I will be creating individual workspaces for you up above our space on Kowhai (generally known as skyboxes in SL).

There will be teleporters to each workspace by the pavilion where we have our discussion sessions and a teleporter back down again on each workspace platform. If you require a workspace please comment your request to this post.

About

This blog provides a point of central support for students enrolled in the NMIT course A&M624. The blog is maintained by Dr Clare Atkins and Aaron Griffiths.

Clare is a Principal Lecturer at NMIT in Nelson and co-led the successful SLENZ project looking at the educational possibilities of virtual worlds. Aaron is a highly acclaimed virtual world developer, specialising in interactive educational content development, courseware design, learning technologies, VR development and educational programming. Aaron is the Director of F/Xual Education Services.